AFRICA NETWORK - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors

A historian by training, Anene Ejikeme is on the faculty at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she also directs the African Studies Concentration in the International Studies Program. In her capacity as African Studies advisor, Dr. Ejikeme supervises students and also works to maintain the visibility of Africa on campus in general. Prior to Trinity, she taught at Barnard College, where she also served as Director of the Pan-African Studies Program. In 2010-2011 she was the NEH Scholar in the Humanities at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. Dr. Ejikeme received her PhD in History from Columbia University and her MA from The Ohio State University. Her research interests center around issues of identity. As well as the survey Customs and Cultures of Namibi a, Anene has published essays on, among other subjects, the boxer Hogan Bassey and Christian women in southern Nigeria.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors
• Retired Professor

Dr. Barry T. Bilderback is a recently retired professor of music history and ethnomusicology in the Lionel Hampton School of Music, where he developed a course titled, Africa's Calling: Culture in Ghana. The interdisciplinary perspective of the course was designed to enhance cultural and environmental awareness through the means of Ghanaian drumming and dance traditions. Prior to his Lionel Hampton School of Music appointment, Dr. Bilderback taught at Linfield College and the University of Oregon. He is also a past president of the College Music Society/Pacific Northwest Chapter (2003-2005). Dr. Bilderback's researched contemporary Ghanaian institutions and the way(s) traditional music is taught. In his study, he collaborated with renowned master drummer Prof. Komla Amoaku (Founder and Director of the Institute for Ghanaian Music), Prof. Kofi Anyidoho (University of Ghana), and Nii "Chief" Tettey Tetteh (Founder and Director of the Kusun Cultural Centre). In other research, he explored the aslatua tradition of the Ga people. In his spare time Dr. Bilderback is a freelance society-style jazz pianist. He also continues his work on the violin and the flute while fine-tuning his kpanlogo and djembe drumming skills under the direction of Ghanaian master drummer Nii Ardey Allotey, and Guinean master drummer Alseny Yansane

Job Titles:

• Executive Director
• Member of the Board of Directors
• Professor of History at Calvin University

Eric Michael Washington is professor of history at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI where he specializes in the history of Africa and Africans in the Western Hemisphere. He is also the director of the African and African Diaspora Studies minor. Dr. Washington is co-author with Michelle Loyd-Paige of the book African Americans: We've Come This Far by Faith, which looks at African Americans' culture and involvement in the Christian Reformed Church in North America. He is completing a book on African American Baptist missionaries in Africa from 1820-1920, has papers on the works of Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie and their engagement of history, an interest on the intersection of African literature and African history, and is also working on the life of Oladuah Equiano and his Interesting Narrative. A native of New Orleans, LA, Dr. Washington received his B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Afro-American history from Loyola University of New Orleans, a Master's of Arts in History from Miami University specializing in African history, and a Ph.D from Michigan State University specializing in African history with minor fields in Latin American and African American history.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors
• Director of Engaged

Fiona Vernal is the Director of Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. In 2023 she will serve as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department, Interim Associate Director of Africana Studies, PI on CT Humanities Partnership Grant to establish an infrastructure for oral history in the state, and Co-PI on the University Capacity Development Program with the Global Training and Development Institute (GTDI) in Global Affairs. Her teaching and research center African, Caribbean, African Diaspora histories. She curates a number of public-facing projects, all of which center oral history as part of its core methodology. Current and past exhibits include: "Child Labor and Human Rights in Africa: The Hidden Costs of Chocolate," (2018); "Children of the Soil: Generations of South Africans under Apartheid," (2016). Her book, The Farmerfield Mission (Oxford, 2012) explores the African vernacularization of Christianity in nineteenth century South Africa. Her new book and digital humanities project, Hartford Bound, integrates oral histories, archival research, and GIS methodologies to offer new visual and spatial histories of race, ethnic belonging, community formation, and community succession. She was awarded the University of Connecticut's Provost Award for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship in 2021.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors
• Professor

Jeffrey Ahlman is a professor of history and the chair of African studies. He specializes in African political, social and cultural history. He is most recently the author of Ghana: A Political and Social History (Zed Books, 2023). Dr. Ahlman's previous books include Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017) and Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation (Ohio University Press, 2021). His published articles have appeared in the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Africa Today, Ghana Studies and Kronos: Southern African Histories, among other venues. He is currently working on a project tentatively titled W. E. B. Du Bois's Africa: History, Theory, and the Politics of a Discipline. At Smith, he teaches a range of courses on African history. These include survey courses on early African history, colonial West Africa, and 19th- and 20th-century Africa as well as topics courses on decolonization, development, gender and sexuality in Africa, and African transnationalism, among others. He also regularly teaches the History Department's introduction to the major ("The Historian's Craft").

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors
• Historian of Sub

Jo Tague is a historian of Sub-Saharan Africa with interests in refugee settlement, international humanitarianism, and African liberation movements. Her first monograph, Displaced Mozambicans in Postcolonial Tanzania, examines a wide range of lived experiences-from refugees and asylum seekers to liberation leaders, students, and migrant workers-during Mozambique's war for independence from Portugal (1964-1974) and their settlement in Tanzania and beyond. The book compels us to reconsider how governments, humanitarian organizations, aid agencies, local citizens, and the displaced themselves defined, debated, and reconstituted what it meant to be a refugee in Africa during decolonization, and it demonstrates how the state of being a refugee could be generative and productive, rather than debilitating and destructive, during this time. Dr. Tague's research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; the National History Center; Fulbright-Hays; the U.S. Department of Education; and the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI). An advocate of the power of international education, as an undergraduate Dr. Tague studied abroad in Zimbabwe through the School for International Training. After graduating, she joined the Peace Corps and was in one of the first groups to serve in post-apartheid South Africa. Prior to joining the faculty at Denison, she taught courses at the University of California/Davis, California State University/Sacramento, as well as at California State University/Chico. She received a B.A. from George Washington University; M.A. from Ohio University; and M.A. and Ph.D. from University of California, Davis.

Job Titles:

• Chairman of the Board
• Hanson Associate

Matt Carotenuto is Hanson Associate Dean of International and Intercultural Studies and professor of history at St. Lawrence University. He teaches survey courses in African history and African studies, upper division classes on constructions of identity and conflict, and seminars on colonial and urban history. A specialist in East Africa, Dr. Carotenuto's co-authored book with Katherine Luongo, Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging (Ohio University Press, 2016) examines the ways African and non-African audiences have used controversial readings of Kenya's past to interpret the political ascendency of a U.S. president. His previous work has focused on Kenyan sport history and politics of ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. At St. Lawrence, he also serves as coordinator of the African Studies program and campus coordinator of SLU's Kenya Semester Program.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors
• Treasurer of the Board of Directors
• Professor of Economics and Executive Director of the Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise

Todd A. Watkins is Professor of Economics and Executive Director of the Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise at Lehigh University. Author of more than 100 related publications, his research and teaching focus on the intersection of inclusive finance, sustainable economic development, social entrepreneurship, and public policy. Author of the book Introduction to Microfinance (World Scientific 2018) and co-editor of the The Future of Microfinance (Brookings, 2020), Dr. Watkins founded and directs Lehigh's Microfinance Program, and was a founding member of the advisory Faculty Council for Accion International's Center for Financial Inclusion, which seeks to promote innovation and growth of commercial microfinance worldwide. He serves as a Board Member and past President of the Rising Tide Community Loan Fund, which targets the business development credit needs of low-to-moderate-income communities in eastern Pennsylvania, USA, and as an officer on four other regional and national non-profit boards. Watkins earned a B.S. in Optics from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. and Master in Public Policy from Harvard University..

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board of Directors
• Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Lafayette College

Wendy Wilson-Fall is Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Lafayette College. Her research engages issues of identity, culture, local histories, and social space. Her published work on these themes includes both African diaspora and continent-based projects. Her research and writing concern themes of exclusivity, inclusion, marginalization, and difference. Dr. Wilson-Fall was director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, from 1999 to 2004, and she is currently an ex-officio board member of its parent organization, the West African Research Association. She currently also serves on the board of the international organization ARED (Associates for Research and Education in Development), an organization that supports literacy in West African languages, with a focus on the Fulani (Pulaar; Fulfulde) language. In addition to work published in academic journals and edited volumes, Wilson-Fall's book Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic engaged questions of identity and orality in relation to oral traditions and the archival story. Current projects include looking at black ethnic identity locally and in the context of global conversations on Africanity. She is a fellow of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at Bayreuth University in Germany, and the Unit on Youth and Pastoral Mobility at University of Gaston Berger in Senegal.